The Chinese Visible Human (CVH) datasets incorporate technical and imaging advances on earlier digital humans.

We report the availability of a digitized Chinese male and a digitzed Chinese female typical of the population and with no obvious abnormalities. The embalming and milling procedures incorporate three technical improvements over earlier digitized cadavers. Vascular perfusion with coloured gelatin was performed to facilitate blood vessel identification. Embalmed cadavers were embedded in gelatin and cryosectioned whole so as to avoid section loss resulting from cutting the body into smaller pieces. Milling performed at -25 degrees C prevented small structures (e.g. teeth, concha nasalis and articular cartilage) from falling off from the milling surface. The male image set (.tiff images each of 36 Mb) has a section resolution of 3072 x 2048 pixels ( approximately 170 micro m, the accompanying magnetic resonance imaging and computer tomography data have a resolution of 512 x 512, i.e. approximately 440 micro m). The Chinese Visible Human male and female datasets are available at http://www.chinesevisiblehuman.com. (The male is 90.65 Gb and female 131.04 Gb). MPEG videos of direct records of real-time volume rendering are at: http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~crc

Creation of the Chinese visible human data set.

The United States Visible Human Project (VHP) created a digital image data set of complete human male (data acquisition finished in November 1994) and female (data acquisition finished in December 1995) cadavers in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and anatomical (anatomic serial section) modes. VHP aroused worldwide enthusiasm for Visible Human Research (VHR), and the data set is being used in a variety of research and educational domains. The Visible Korean Human (VKH) male was produced in March 2001. To accelerate worldwide VHR and to promote virtual anatomy as a revolutionary break with conventional anatomy, more visible human data sets representative of different populations of the world are in demand. The Chinese Visible Human (CVH) male (created in October 2002) and female (created in February 2003) project achieved greater integrity of images, easier blood vessel identification, and were free of organic lesion (unlike the other visible human projects). We performed data acquisition, three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction, and visualization with improved technology to create CVH male and female. CVH is the first volumetric data representing a complete normal adult human male and female of an Asian population. This article presents the history of Chinese Visible Human cadavers and the methods and technology used to produce the data set.